Re: How to import string and numerical data with arbitrary number of columns

[João Rodrigues]

On 01-09-2013 14:56, Markus Bergholz wrote:

What I really wanted was an alternative to textread that would do something like:

res = textread(filename,"%s %s %f")

and would create res as a cell whose columns were the different objects returned by textread  (in this case two string cell vectors and one numerical vector).

try this function

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5301419/how-do-i-read-a-delimited-file-with-strings-numbers-with-octave/8319848#8319848

and if you just need the floating numbers, use dlmread like this:  res = dlmread ("data"," ", 0, 2); %skip 2 columns

Thanks for the tips.

The stackoverflow function involves an fgetl loop, which I wanted to avoid, but the dlmread is probably a good idea:

I can do textread to a string cell vector, reshape and discard the numerical part, and separately use dlmread to get the floating numbers as a numerical array. That way it's possible to avoid eval, loops and cellfun.

All the best,
joao